FortiGate Application Traffic Shaping

This is a really cool and easy to use feature of the FortiGate firewall: the traffic shaper. Once an application category uses too much traffic, the bandwidth consumption can be decreased with it. Just about three clicks:

In my case, a customer had an ISP connection of 20 Mbps. Sometimes, the replication of Lotus Notes takes all of this bandwidth which results in packet delay for all other sessions. We decided to limit the “collaboration” application category to a max bandwidth of 10 M. Immediately, the ISP connection was not slowed down anymore.

The following screenshots show how to configure a traffic shaper and how to use it on an application category. The third screenshots shows the overall bandwidth (interface history of wan1) which dropped from 20 to 10 Mbps. Perfect.